[jeffbee]

> Or calculated the costs of all the airplanes flying around

This is the key comparison. A 747-400 burns 10+ metric tons of kerosene per hour, which means its basic energy consumption is > 110MW. The cost to train GPT-3 was approximately the same energy spent by one 8-hour airline flight.

[riverdweller]

Equivalently, the energy used to train GPT-3 was the same as the energy consumed by Bitcoin in just four minutes.